Ah, the irony! Wearing airpods to every social event may be acceptable in certain circles. Honestly, I would never have cared if someone else did it socially even before I had any idea about hearing issues. But it is absolutely not socially or professionally acceptable to wear airpods at client meetings (even those in noisy restaurants) or other professional settings. That’s why I sucked it up and bought hearing aids.
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These Airpods 2 Pro sound great as backup HAs. However I just went through a (very long) 2022 thread on these devices. The conclusion (it seems) was that these pods do not store your audiogram- this sits in your iOS device. So that means that to use these as HAs I need to walk around with an iPad in my backpocket (with my Android phone in the other pocket)? And no sound correction when streaming from non-iOS devices? Do these HAs really only work in Apple’s walled garden?
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Yeah, that’s a fair point. I never thought about it, because I always had iphones. You can probably get an older iphone that would serve the purpose for fairly cheap, but I guess you’d still have to carry it around. Hopefully that’s something Apple will fix, though if the point of this is to encourage people to buy iphones, they may purposely choose not to.
The bigger problem is that IIRC, ‘live’ (non-streamed) sound in transparency mode doesn’t use the audiogram. I guess that makes sense if the audiogram lives on the device, because that sound isn’t transmitted through the device. You can boost one of three channels (low, mid, high), and IIRC that changes the live sound, but trying to use the audiogram doesn’t do anything. But between the existing noise canceling abilities and the conversation boost feature (directional beamforming), that was still very helpful for me in noisy environments.
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Thx for explaining! That’s really ugly, and I wonder how people (the FDA) can confuse airpods with HAs. The Soundcore (Liberty Air2) earbuds I use for a lot of streaming aren’t HAs either, but they do allow me to take an audiogram, it stores the data in the device and transmits customized (amplified) sound no matter the source (Android/Apple). Oh, and they cost half the price of Airpods…
My son says it works to correct his loss in transparency mode. I think it works until connect to a non-iOS device. Last I knew, this includes Mac OS. Maybe the drop next week will include the Macs.
WH
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This is the thing. Most hearing aids are subtle, if not hidden. It’s already obnoxious enough when people are walking around with their AirPods in to make calls or listen to music. Now people are going to keep them in during conversations so that they can hear better? Great for them I guess. Sucks for the people having to talk to the person and wonder if they are using them as a hearing aid or just being too lazy and obnoxious to take them out of their ears.
I’m all for Apple developing a hearing aid. Make it not look like a silly AirPod.
What’s the difference between a person wearing a hearing aid versus an AirPod in terms of another person not knowing whether the person is streaming music or on a phone call? Seeing the AirPod versus not seeing the hearing aid does not change whether the wearer is distracted.
In strictly functional terms, not much, because the advent of bluetooth-enabled hearing aids has blurred that line beyond recognition. But the average observer doesn’t know hearing aids can double as earbuds now, and has never given a moment’s thought to the possibility. They also don’t know that airpods double as hearing aids now (though that may change once Apple gets serious about advertising this). But they know someone wearing hearing aids needs them to hear, and that the fact that they’re wearing hearing aids says nothing either way about whether those aids are currently being used for streaming because they’d have them in all day anyway. That’s not how most people use airpods, so of course it’s perceived differently.
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Funny- I have the opposite problem. When outdoors (usually walking the dog) I am often streaming podcasts to my barely visible Phonaks, and people do not understand I cannot easily hear them until I tap my ears to stop the streaming…
It might help if people could buy airpods in a different color, signaling they are being doubled as HAs. It might also help if Apple designs these things as true standalaone HAs (so they don’t only work when carrying an iPhone along).
I actually sent an email or wrote a letter (can’t remember) to Tim Cook several years ago, suggesting exactly what they’ve done w/the Airpods. As I recall it was in the timeframe when they came out with the noise cancellation Airpods. There was an impediment at the time, in that the federal government had not approved OTC hearing aids. But the word at the time was that they were looking closely at it, so that low cost producers could break into the hearing aid market and give seniors some help on prices.
I thought that a noise cancellation device like the Airpods had possibilities for people who have a very mild hearing loss. After all, there were people at the time who were buying hunting hearing devices and using them with some level of success for hearing aids. Did Apple do what they’ve done due to my input? I’d be shocked. If I could see the future they saw it long before me. My point here is that this is such a no-brainer for a product like Airpods, with all of their connectivity and adjustability features and low cost, that even I could think of it.
Imho the very reason they are not doing this is the stigma associated with wearing aids. You can be ‘cool with the kids’ and wear AirPods while having your hearing enhanced on the quiet.
Apple aren’t stupid: they’ve identified a gap between need and fulfilment and have deliberately positioned the AirPod function in that gap. Thereby shifting more product, nailing people into the Apple ecosystem from a market sector where the natural uptake of IOS devices might not be that strong.
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Since you asked…
(I can’t get it to embed right, but it’s a custom electronics painting service that has dozens of colors to choose from.)
I briefly kicked around the idea getting these in metallic graphite, in the hopes that they’d either be recognized as a hearing aid or at least not look like airpods. Obviously that was never going to work, which is why I didn’t drop $400 on it.